Yesterday morning I heard an announcement for a concert taking place this weekend in Toronto. It's Matisyahu, the Hasidic Raggae Superstar. Need I say more?

I don't know much about raggae, and I'm not a very big fan. But based on my limited exposure to the genre, I'll say he sounds pretty good. I have to wonder how he holds up on the reggae world stage -- is it just a clever gimmick?

And no, he doesn't perform on the sabbath.

I can't resist another mention of the gay marriage debate. The most recent news is that Stephen Harper, leader of the conservative party, warned that an acceptance of same-sex marriage would merely pave the way for polygamy. Lock your doors! The perverts are coming!

In light of this baloney, CBC ran a segment this morning featuring guests arguing for and against gay marriage. The "con" man (ha!) was a representative from Enshrine Marriage Canada. He opened with an absolutely wonderful statement. I paraphrase:

We've always said that the institution of marriage is like a four-legged chair. It rests on the four critical pillars of number, gender, age, and incest. Take away any of these four pillars and the chair becomes unstable.

Yes, yes, he believes that these are the four factors we need to consider when deciding who should be allowed to marry. But what a fantastically misguided bit of rhetoric. The very essence of stability is an object resting on another in exactly three places -- think of that wobbly restaurant table that only wants to sit on three of its four legs. A three-legged chair is much less likely to wobble than a four-legged chair. So let's knock out that fourth leg!

Incidetally, he also spent a lot of time saying things like "well, I think all Canadians agree that...". Piss off.

Dear Paul,

Hello! How are you? I am fine. I hope you're doing alright running the Canadian government.

I urge you to offer your full support to same-sex marriage and not worry about the stone age opinions of a bunch of small minded religious zealots.

Sincerely yours,
Doctor Thingo

For the moment, let's put aside the issue itself. I could launch into a long tirade about gay rights, one that I've started and stopped several times for this site but never posted. To me, it's a very boring question. Should gay people be allowed to marry each other? Yes. Period. Should any religion be able to tell me how I can live my life? No. Period. It's the attempt to impose morals upon me that bugs me more than the actual homophobia.

No, what I find interesting is the "open letter" idea. My letter above is a response to one published in the Globe and Mail by Aloysius Ambrozic (what a great name), the Archbishop of Toronto. He urges Paul Martin to invoke the "notwithstanding clause" to put the debate on gay marriage into suspended animation.

Aloysius's letter will be read by many people. Mine won't. How did that get decided? By what measure do you determine that your opinion deserves to be broadcast in an Open Letter? I could publish an open letter in the Globe if I wanted, but nobody would care. Why does Aloysius make news with his? Is it because he's rich, or famous? What if Shania Twain published an open letter on gay marriage? Conrad Black? Kofi Annan?

I guess the difference is that Aloysius claims to be speaking for a large number of people, i.e. Canadian Catholics. On the other hand, I assume the letter is a personal initiative -- he didn't confer with Canadian Catholics before writing it, nor are they signatories. In fact, a large number of them disagree outright with the Archbishop.

Anyway, if you're reading this, Paul, you know how I stand on the issue. As for the rest of you, I don't get the Globe and Mail, so if you do please turn to the open letter in question and look at it sternly, giving it a disapproving shake of the head. Thanks.

After a scant two days, two hardworking gentlemen have replaced all the windows in our house. Okay, not quite all the windows -- not the windows embedded in doors, or the frosted vertical window next to the front door, or the small window in the downstairs bathroom, or one other window in the basement. That last window was a seeming source of disagreement for the window guys. The salesman didn't have any problem with it, but the guy who came to take measurements complained that it was below grade and that replacement could cause leaks. His opinion prevailed, because although I called the salesman to check on this window, he took ill around the same time and never got back to me. No matter -- we can always take care of it later.

As I was saying, all the windows are now replaced. They'll be back tomorrow to finish the job, trimming foam and adding trim and flashing. But already I'm delighted with the new ones. The windows we had were mostly original, 50 to 75 years old. We're talking about single-pane, single-hung wood-frame windows. Covered with grime and paint splotches. Warped, drafty, hard to open or close. Storm windows that no longer fit and were awkward to hang in any case. The new windows are low-E double-glazed vinyl, functional and not unattractive. We chose a mix of styles depending on location -- some fixed-frame, some casement, some single- or double-hung. All installed via retrofit, meaning that the window is placed inside the existing frame instead of constructing a new frame altogether. Retrofit is perfectly justified for a house like ours, where the original window frames were made out of some heavy-duty, sturdy wood of a kind that probably wouldn't be used today.

Our main goal in installing new windows is energy conservation. After two days, I'll say tentatively that it's working. Parts of the house definitely feel warmer. No part of the house has gotten colder. And some of those areas will need more help than mere windows. Thus our next project is new insulation for the attic, and possibly for the joist headers and other parts of the basement.

Incidentally, my secondary goal for new windows is energy consumption. Nath and I agreed that it would be foolish to get air conditioning without new windows to keep the cool air in. But that's longer true. There's no rush to get air conditioning, particularly since we can now enjoy the benefit of an apparently modern technology called "screens".

[update: 19 January at 15:56]: Near the end: "that's longer true" isn't very meaningful. I meant "that's no longer true".

Wednesday the weather started to get warmer. And warmer, and warmer, and warmer. It rained most of the day, culminating in thunderstorms as I was leaving campus. Thunderstorms. In Ontario. In January. That is just not right.

Thursday was still warm, but not rainy, and Nath spent some time walking around in a t-shirt. In January -- did I mention? Yesterday and today are back to normal -- brisk and cold. Forgive me for saying, but I'm glad to see the chill return. While a walk outside in balmy, spring-like weather was an interesting novelty, I'd hate to think that we're losing our winter, and I hate to contemplate the reasons why.

Allow me to cleanse myself of the insipid hold music of the previous post with a brief mention of KEXP's top 90.3 albums of 2004. KEXP is an amazing independent radio station from Seattle They're easily available in streaming format over the internet, even providing a full CD quality, uncompressed stream if you've got bandwidth to burn.

KEXP plays actual, real music. They're not music industry whores, they don't have some corporate HQ handing down playlists full of pap. If I listen for more than an hour I'll probably hear something brand new, that I would never have heard anywhere else, and that's good enough that I'll go out and buy the CD. That's how I discovered TV on the Radio and Chris Joss last year. No obnoxious commercials (no commercials at all), no news/sports/weather on the hour, no puerile morning show, just DJs playing music followed by more DJs playing more music.

One warning: the top 90.3 list includes a streaming archive of the entire countdown. That's very good. The stream ends just before the beginning of the #1 album (by The Arcade Fire). That's very, very bad. Fortunately you can listen to some of their songs online.

I'm currently on hold with my online brokerage's customer support help line, where I am being treated to painful, insipid hold music. The music is designed to throttle your brain so that when the customer service droid finally answers, you're a gibbering mess who can't recall what they wanted. Makes for short calls. From time to time, the music is punctuated by portentous pauses, suggesting that a human representative is nigh. Not so. It's probably a kind of variable-schedule reinforcement mechanism, designed to build a psychological addiction to the hold queue so that you don't hang up. Oh, and a voice occasionally informs you that "your call will be answered in the order it was received". I hate that. A call is a single event, and has no order unto itself. They really mean to be addressing everybody who's holding, saying "your calls will be answered in the order they were received". But that couldn't work, could it? The voice can't seem to be addressing all of us, since we're not sharing an acoustic environment. The solution is obvious: everyone who's holding should be allowed to talk to one another in a big conference call. But I digress.

[Okay, I admit that they finally answered mid-way through the previous paragraph. But I'll continue nevertheless.]

The original impetus for this call came this past summer, in Collingwood. While driving, we were listening to Sting's "Brand New Day" and he sung the line that forms the subject of this entry. I've heard it a thousand times, but something clicked at that moment and I realized that's exactly what we should do. My, uh, "investments" are festering, and have no hope of ever making me money (except possibly via capital loss). It turns out that my diversified portfolio of biotech and e-commerce is not a winning combination.

So I'll sell the stock and we'll spend all the money. In particular, we'll spend it to partially cover the cost of new windows, which are due to arrive at the beginning of next week. In the long run, new windows are bound to make us more money than the stock, because we expect them to bring down our high heating costs by a noticeable amount. Hopefully we can pay off this project and move on to re-insulating the roof, probably the other biggest win in terms of energy conservation.

Incidentally, the reason I was calling customer service was because some of my holdings are so worthless that with the brokerage's commission I lose money by selling them. Supposedly, their American affiliate lets you get around this, and I'm hoping I can do the same here. I simply want to say "No thanks, I don't want those shares. You can have them."